That's a brief trailer for Ingenious, an old-fashioned tale of American invention -- the story of tinkerers and dreamers who tried to do something they were told was impossible. You can click any of these buttons to order:

A few years ago I came across a short article in a Florida newspaper about a guy named Al Smith, who had won an award for “Public Defense Investigator of the Year.” I wasn’t even aware that “public defense investigator” was a job that someone could have, so I called Al Smith, and he told me his story: For 26 years he had been a cop, putting people in jail, but now he was working for the “other side,” using his knowledge of police technology and procedure to help overburdened public defenders challenge police testimony and beat powerful prosecutors. It turned out that Smith was in charge of a whole team of ex-cops who worked for the public defender in Broward County, Howard Finkelstein. There aren’t a lot of good models for reining in bad police — the police aren’t good at policing themselves, and civilian oversight boards tend to be slow and toothless — and after visiting Broward and talking to the investigators and attorneys, I felt like they had built an innovative model that could work.

In August 2011, during a nighttime raid in Afghanistan, 30 American soldiers, eight Afghans, and a military search canine were killed when a Taliban fighter struck their helicopter with an RPG. Charlie Strange’s cryptologist son was one of the dead. Charlie, a blackjack dealer at a Philadelphia casino, didn’t accept the military’s explanation for the failed mission, and spent the next several years fighting for a new investigation. Along the way he sued the NSA.

A profile of Jason Leopold, investigative reporter and FOIA expert. Doing this piece taught me a lot about the open-records process, its dysfunctions and limitations but also its latent power. Since this piece went up, Leopold has published a number of scoops related to the CIA torture report.

It’s a great Christie profile. I’ve been interested in Christie since I wrote about him for Philly mag in 2010, and I’ve been waiting for someone to go back over his early career, 1993 to 1997, when he first began building a reputation as a corruption fighter and trampling opponents. He won his first campaign, for instance, by smearing a 62-year-old grandmother and former schoolteacher named Cecelia Laureys, along with two of her ticketmates. I always thought this was a telling episode, yet it seemed to disappear from his biography. Here’s Lizza’s paragraph that resurrects it:

Christie lowered his expectations and, for his second campaign, ran for freeholder. This time, he was a reform candidate, promising to restore honest government, and he produced a TV ad charging that three of his opponents in the nine-person Republican primary were being “investigated by the Morris County prosecutor,” a serious accusation that happened to be false. Christie won the primary and then the general election, in part by assuring a more socially moderate electorate, “I am pro-choice.” But his victory was marred by the divisiveness of the campaign. The three victims of Christie’s false ad, including a freeholder named Cecilia Laureys, successfully sued him for defamation, and, after he lost an appeal, as part of the settlement he was forced to apologize to them in local newspapers. Laureys died last July, but her son, Christopher, who was her communications director, told me, “This was beyond the pale of what anyone had ever done in politics in Morris County. He was a lawyer who said they were being criminally investigated. He looked into the camera and lied.”

It’s not really a Christie profile. The true subject of the story is how power functions in New Jersey, a state whose structure of government lends itself to balkanization and rule by political bosses. Lizza meets a boss from the north, Joseph DiVincenzo, and a boss from the south, George Norcross, and gets these guys talking with a remarkable frankness about their political operations. I have no idea how Lizza pulled this off. But it’s useful that he did, because once you see the tectonic plates of New Jersey, you can appreciate how shrewdly Christie navigated the terrain.

With the launch of Vox, there’s been a lot of discussion about its model of “explanatory journalism.” I like what I’ve seen on Vox so far and think they’ve found a promising new form. (I also admire that they launched their site with a piece on confirmation bias, a phenomenon that complicates the project of explanatory journalism and a lot of other journalism besides; it seems way better to name the problem and describe it clearly than to not address it at all.) But this New Yorker story is the kind of explanatory journalism that has always excited me. Here you get a whole world: not just the gears of an entire political culture but the people at the levers and the people caught in the works. And it’s thrilling.

The nine-day INGENIOUS road trip and book tour, featuring me and Kevin Smith of Illuminati Motor Works, is over. Thank you to all who spread the word on Twitter and Facebook, to those who hosted us, and to those who attended the events. Thanks as well to Crown Publishers for supporting us. Some of the positives:

A few images will stick with me. Sports-car enthusiasts huddled around “Seven” at a classic-car meetup in New Jersey. Kevin delivering a soliloquy on rule-of-thumb engineering to students at MIT. Illuminati team members Nick Smith and George Kennedy, stoic and silent, trailering the car in the cold. Kevin standing next to the car in the dark outside a warehouse in Hoboken and explaining its features to 10 enthusiastic Hobokenites as I mentally begged him to wrap up because I was freezing. Scrambling to find parking for a 42-foot-long truck-and-trailer combo in New York City. Kevin zipping through Brooklyn traffic in the electric car so we wouldn’t be late to meet a reporter. The beauty of the powerHOUSE Arena in Dumbo and the shocking and uncharacteristic brevity of Kevin’s talk there. Jen making a surprise appearance at powerHOUSE, holding a cardboard sign that said “207 MPGe or Bust.” Kevin stopping at a gas station in Red Oak, Virginia, where the owner emerged and told us, laughing, “Sorry, we don’t sell spaceship fuel.” Kevin hawking the book in rest-stop parking lots. Kevin inspiring the children at my daughter’s school with a story about how he and my daughter made a farting My Little Pony doll out of LittleBits. Finally, I’ll always remember the wonderful tour-capping event in Charlottesville that brought together many of the people in the book: Kevin and Oliver Kuttner and Ann Cohen and Brad Jaeger and David Brown.

One final thank you: Thank you to my travel companions, Kevin Smith, Nick Smith, and George Kennedy. And especially Kevin. He was game for everything. He did his best to lift my spirits when I was stressed and worried. He was charming and funny and he made the whole thing work. It was inspiring to watch him speak about this car of his, this dream.

“There is nothing in the history of technology in the past century and a half to suggest that infallible methods of invention have been discovered or are, in fact, discoverable…. As with most other human activities, the monotony and sheer physical labor in research can be relieved by the use of expensive equipment and tasks can thereby be attempted which would otherwise be wholly impossible. But it does not appear that new mysteries will only be solved and new applications of natural forces made possible by ever increasing expenditure. In many fields of knowledge, discovery is still a matter of scouting about on the surface of things where imagination and acute observation, supported only by simple technical aids, are likely to bring rich rewards.”

–from The Sources of Invention, 1969, and the epigraph of a book that someone handed to Illuminati Motor Works‘s Kevin Smith at our MIT event. Kevin read this passage and told me, “It could have been written yesterday.”

So INGENIOUS is out now, and people are reading it. Most seem to like it, which is gratifying. If you’re reading INGENIOUS, please shoot me a note and let me know what you think.

I wanted to gather a couple of links to nice things that have happened since the pub date.

1. I gave a 5-minute talk at Ignite Philly, an event where people are invited to share their passions with a supportive and increasingly drunk audience at Johnny Brenda’s, a bar in Philadelphia. Here’s the audio of all 15 Ignite talks, and here’s the audio of my talk, which was about why most cars suck from an efficiency standpoint and the inventors who are trying to change that.

2. Mother Jones, Slate, and Longreads published different excerpts of the book. Mother Jones also did a fun Q&A with me about how I picked the four Automotive X Prize teams I followed in the book, whether the prize resulted in any practical advances, and which car I’d most want to drive.

3. Matt Staggs at Biographile asked me a bunch of great questions about how I researched the book, the reputation of inventors in the culture, and why the X Prize almost wrecked a couple of lives.

6. Susan Carpenter, automotive writer for the Orange County Register, wrote a review of INGENIOUS in the Register’s Wheels section. I like the review because it’s sharp and well-written, but I also like it because I’ve been curious to know what true automotive experts think of the book, and Carpenter seems to appreciate what I tried to do. The piece is behind a paywall, so I’ll pull out a few quotes:

“A paean to the long-lost American art of invention, ‘Ingenious’ is a story that has all the built-in drama of the best fiction. It’s driven by characters that are, by turns, whip smart and wide-eyed and desperate, and a plot to achieve a seemingly unobtainable goal.”…

“Fagone does an impeccable job of conveying the angst of teams that had literally put everything on the line – their livelihoods, their marriages, their financial, emotional and physical well-being… He artfully conveys the competitors’ emotions along with the inner workings of technology in a manner that is understandable to the layman yet satisfying for the mechanically knowledgeable – a difficult feat most likely born from Fagone’s inherent disinterest in cars coupled with the imperative that he truly understand them…

“With ‘Ingenious,’ Fagone has penned a thought-provoking book that will appeal to automotive efficiency geeks and readers who long for America’s can-do past…”

7. Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon reviewed it. Sonny is very smart and I’ve enjoyed his writing for a while. I like this review because Sonny and I disagree about a lot of stuff politically, and he’s honest about what irritated him about my point of view. He finds things to appreciate about the book anyway:

Regardless, Ingenious is a fun read for car buffs, filled with quirky folks and quirkier autos. It’s a testament to Fagone’s writing that I left the book wanting to know more about one of the couples featured in the book, the wifely half of which initiates a divorce at the contest’s conclusion. And I wanted to know more about the cars as well. Will the Illuminati’s huge car ever be more than a one-off oddity? Will Edison2′s tiny car win over skeptical corporate overlords?

Even though I was there for parts of the competition, even though I knew how the story ends, while listening to this audio book I found myself cheering the teams, on the verge of tears during one scene at knockout because other “characters” were crying, and giddy at the “race” itself. I was experiencing it again and yet for the first time, as if maybe, just maybe, the ending would be different for some teams.

I’m a natural pessimist, and yet upon finishing this book I came away with the feeling of a rekindled excitement, a hope for the future, and much, much love.

10. I’ve pretty much finalized the itinerary for the Ingenious Road Trip in December. It looks kind of like this:

And here’s the map:

Here’s more info on the events. If you live near any of these places and you’re at all interested in the book or in electric vehicles or in the future of transportation, please do come out and see the show. It would be great to meet you.

To all who have tweeted about the book or shared these links with friends, thank you so much. More reviews etc. on the way.

I have a 10- to 15-minute Keynote talk about the book and the cars. I have a portable LCD projector. I have a Bluetooth clicker. God help me, I bought a Bluetooth clicker. I will bring the clicker and the projector to your bookstore or hacker space or university club, and I will bring the maniac Kevin Smith, and Kevin will bring his magnificent car. We’ll talk about the book together. We’ll talk about ingenuity and innovation and aerodynamics and electric-vehicle technology and why a lot of cars suck and how they can be better. We’ll talk about the power of ordinary people to change the world. Then we’ll give people rides in the car.

Does this sound like fun? I think it sounds like fun. But like I said, I need your help. Do you know anyone at a bookstore or hacker space or university that might want to host us? We could use any advice or direction. Please let me know: jasonfagone@comcast.net and @jfagone on Twitter. Thanks.

Hi. So it’s Sunday morning and I thought I’d take a few minutes to let you know what’s going on with me. The big thing is that the publication of my book, Ingenious, is one month away now. Books start shipping (or escaping electronically) on November 5. I’m excited. I’ve been thinking about the people in the book and trying to write their story for more than three years. Now others will read and respond, I hope, which is fun to think about.

Ingenious in a couple sentences: It’s about inventors and cars. In 2007, a nonprofit foundation announced a $10 million prize to create a 100-mile-per-gallon-equivalent car. This was before the Chevy Volt, before the Nissan Leaf, before the Tesla Model S. You couldn’t go to a dealer and lease a 100-MPG car for $250 a month like you can today. Because $10 million is a lot of money, more than 100 teams set out back then to build the car of the future. Mostly they were people you’ve never heard of — not big automakers but garage hackers, students and teachers, real-estate developers, race mechanics and engineers, coders, startups. I picked four teams and followed them through the competition and for three years after. The book is the story of the amazing things they achieved.

My first reading is on Saturday, October 19 at Philadelphia’s 215 Festival. The festival lineup this year is impressive: Nicholson Baker, Neal Pollack, Amanda Petrusich, Steve Volk. If you’re in Philly on Saturday, please come out. I’m reading with my friend Volk. I’ve seen him read before. He is really good. I’m going to try to keep the formal “reading” part short; instead I’ll try to show some slides, some pictures of cars, and just tell stories from the book. I’ll also talk about how the auto companies lost their way, how they let cars get heavy and bloated and aerodynamically offensive and why this is bad and stupid and what you can do about it.

I didn’t want to be within fifteen hundred miles of this darling girl. I didn’t want to be in this October city. I wanted to be back aboard my Busted Flush moored in Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale, my 52 feet of custom houseboat which I could fill with my favorite brand of darling girls, the brown untroubled ones, eager galley slaves, the hair-salty, rump-sandy, beer-opening, fish-catching, happy-making girls in sun-faded fabrics, sun-streaked hair. But Miss Nina looked at me out of her brother Mike’s true blue eyes, and he had never asked me for anything else.

Lately, in between other projects, I’ve been reading about guns and the gun debate. After the Newtown massacre, it’s been hard not to. Also, I live just outside of Philadelphia, where it’s likely that gun-related violence has left tens of thousands with post-traumatic stress disorder, and where 1,243 people have been shot this year alone. This is an attempt to organize my thoughts and document some of what I’ve learned. I’m far from an expert, so if you know a fair amount about this issue, you’ll probably find this stuff redundant and obvious. I’m embarrassed to say that much of it has come as a surprise to me.

The AR-15 semi-automatic rifle was Adam Lanza’s gun. It’s what he used to murder 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Have you seen all these stories about people flooding gun shows and gun shops to buy the same gun and the same high-capacity magazines of .223-caliber ammo? The simple fact is that we have no idea how many are law-abiding citizens and how many are felons, dangerously mentally ill, or otherwise prohibited from owning guns. Surely the vast majority are law-abiding citizens. But what’s the split? 99.99/.01? 98/2? No idea. We don’t know.

The obvious fix is to make background checks universal. Background checks are the low-hanging fruit of this debate. People on both the left and the right agree that we need to require them on all gun purchases. But on Meet the Press recently, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre disagreed. “What the anti-second amendment movement wants to do is put every gun sale in he country under the thumb of the federal government,” he said. “Congress debated this at length. They said if you’re a hobbyist or collector, if someone in West Virginia, a hunter, wants to sell a gun to another hunter, he ought to be able to do it without being under the thumb of the federal government.”

In May 2009, Sam French hit bottom, once again. A relative found him face down in his carport “talking gibberish,” according to court records. He later told medical personnel that he had been conversing with a bear in his backyard and hearing voices. His family figured he had gone off his medication for bipolar disorder, and a judge ordered him involuntarily committed — the fourth time in five years he had been hospitalized by court order.

When Mr. French’s daughter discovered that her father’s commitment meant it was illegal for him to have firearms, she and her husband removed his cache of 15 long guns and three handguns, and kept them after Mr. French was released in January 2010 on a new regime of mood-stabilizing drugs.

Ten months later, he appeared in General District Court — the body that handles small claims and traffic infractions — to ask a judge to restore his gun rights. After a brief hearing, in which Mr. French’s lengthy history of relapses never came up, he walked out with an order reinstating his right to possess firearms.

The next day, Mr. French retrieved his guns.

“The judge didn’t ask me a whole lot,” said Mr. French, now 62. “He just said: ‘How was I doing? Was I taking my medicine like I was supposed to?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

The Times piece goes on to describe how the NRA and Congress created this loophole. It had to do with the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which a mentally unstable Virginia Tech student named Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 and wounded 17 in a gun rampage on that school’s campus. As it turned out, a judge had flagged Cho, two years earlier, as “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.” Cho should have been stopped from buying his guns — two semi-automatic pistols, a Glock and a Walther. But he wasn’t. He bought the Walther at a pawn shop and cleared the background check after just a ten-minute wait.

After Virginia Tech, Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, who has sought to limit illegal gun sales, helped pass a bill to make it easier for states to share their mental-health records with the FBI, which manages the background-check system. The NRA agreed — but there was a catch. They wanted to carve out a path for people in the system — people who had been deemed “mentally defective” or involuntarily committed for mental-health care — to get their gun rights back if they could show that they were no longer a threat to public safety. The NRA said it was to help returning veterans; the NRA’s chief lobbyist told the Times, “We don’t want to treat our soldiers as potential criminals because they’re struggling with the aftermath of dealing with their service.”

“After the bill became law in 2008,” the Times writes, “the N.R.A. began lobbying state lawmakers to keep requirements for petitioners to a minimum.”

3. There isn’t enough good data. Forget, for a second, that 40 percent of gun sales take place without background checks. Forget that we can never know how many criminals are buying guns on the informal market. Let’s just ask a simple question about sales from licensed dealers. In the last month alone, three shooters intent on killing as many as possible — the Clackamas mall shooter, Adam Lanza, and the murderer of the Rochester firefighters — have selected AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. So: In the two weeks after Newtown, how many people who tried to buy AR-15s from licensed gun dealers were screened out by background checks?

We don’t know the answer. We don’t know because the government only releases the most paltry aggregate yearly data on people who are denied guns by background checks. The data on the FBI’s website is only broken down by the reason for denial: so many felons, so many fugitives, etc. It’s not broken down by state, region, city, gun shop, or type of gun.

As a nation, we collect data on auto accidents. We collect data on outbreaks of food poisoning and defective children’s toys. We do this to prevent unnecessary deaths. When it comes to guns, though, we don’t collect data in the same way. The NRA, by arguing that better data would only lead to gun confiscation, has successfully pressured Congress and some states to stop the collection and public dissemination of data that might help us get a handle on the gun-violence and illegal-gun problem.

The NRA has targeted the Centers for Disease Control, intimidating its leaders and its scientists. It has targeted doctors, supporting legislation in seven states that would punish doctors if they “even discuss firearm safety” with patients. (Florida already has such a law.) The NRA has even kept essential streams of data out of the hands of law enforcement. In 2003, a Kansas Congressman and NRA ally named Todd Tiahrt inserted an amendment into a larger spending bill that “removed from the public record a government database that traces guns recovered in crimes back to the dealers,” according to a 2010 Washington Post story. The amendment effectively “shields retailers from lawsuits, academic study and public scrutiny.” A police source told the Post that the Tiahrt Amendment “was extraordinary, and the most offensive thing you can think of. The tracing data, which is now secret, helped us see the big picture of where guns are coming from.”

When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.

About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.

In the past few weeks I’ve read a lot of arguments against passing new laws to limit illegal guns and reduce gun violence. Most of these arguments say there’s no data showing that prior laws have been effective — in particular, the assault-weapons ban of 1994-2004. Maybe that’s because the assault-weapons ban really didn’t work. (Salon has gathered studies showing that the ban was indeed effective.) But maybe it’s because Congress has made it extraordinarily hard to know the answer.

4. A semi-automatic rifle with .223-caliber ammunition is a powerful weapon. After the Sandy Hook massacre, I noticed several writers making an argument that struck me as odd: Adam Lanza’s gun — a Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle — isn’t a particularly powerful one. I first saw the argument in a New York Times story on the AR-15: “Defenders say that most AR-15s are chambered for .223 or 5.56 ammunition, low-caliber rounds that are less deadly than those used in many handguns.” It also popped up at the National Review, where Robert VerBruggen argued that “the .223-caliber ammo in Lanza’s rifle is banned for deer hunting in some states on the grounds that it’s too weak,” and at the Daily Beast, where Megan McArdle wrote that the AR-15 “is normally used for target shooting and varmint hunting; my understanding is that it is not really big enough to humanely take down a deer.”

The more I looked, the more examples I found. Here’s a former member of the NRA board of directors arguing after the Clackamas Mall shooting in Oregon that the shooter’s .223 Remington “is not a particularly high-powered cartridge at all.” Here’s the editor of a small-town Pennsylvania newspaper arguing that “The rifle used in [Newtown] was not a ‘high-powered’ rifle… most hunters consider it unethical to use .223 cartridge on deer.” Here’s Instapundit in 2003, after D.C. sniper John Muhammad was apprehended with a Bushmaster .223, criticizing a lefty journalist for referring to the Bushmaster “as a ‘high-powered rifle.’ It’s not. Rifles firing the .223 cartridge aren’t ‘high-powered’ and calling them that just shows ignorance.” In his book Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, gun-industry reporterPaul Barrett argues that “military-style rifles… do not use particularly powerful ammunition, at least compared to the .30-06 rounds preferred by many hunters.” (To be fair to Barrett, he does add later, “A couple of well-placed bullets of any standard caliber will do grievous harm.”)

It’s true that .223 rounds aren’t as large as other kinds of rounds. But everything else about the argument that they are “weak” or “less lethal” or “not particularly powerful” is false and misleading.

I didn’t realize this at first. I didn’t know enough. I had read the medical examiner’s comments about the Newtown children’s “devastating” wounds: Lanza’s bullets were “ ‘designed in such a fashion [so that] the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in,’ resulting in deep damage.” I was confused: Given the recent carnage, how could anyone say that Lanza’s rifle wasn’t high-powered? So I asked a question on my Twitter feed about the line from the New York Times article: “Defenders say that most AR-15s are chambered for .223 or 5.56 ammunition, low-caliber rounds that are less deadly than those used in many handguns.” Seth Fletcher, an editor at Popular Science who grew up in southwest Missouri, responded in a series of tweets I’ve stitched together here:

That is one of the most disingenuous things I have ever read. I’ve fired a .223 rifle. They are cannons. *M16s* shoot .223…. Saying .223 is a small caliber and thus less deadly than handgun ammo is like saying gamma rays have short wavelengths, thus less deadly. Caliber = diameter. Not mass or velocity or power. .223 is small caliber but has LOTS of gunpowder behind it. Thus deadly at 100s of yards.

To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw an ugly little toy. Wherever one stood, no one could deny the ballistics were intriguing. The .223’s larger load of propellant and the AR-15’s twenty-inch barrel worked together to move the tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds — in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound.

So: Is the .223 a powerful round? I guess it depends on your definition of powerful.

The .223 may be controversial as a deer round, but ammunition experts argue that it is certainly capable of getting the job done quickly and efficiently.

“With good shot placement and bullet selection, I have no doubt in my mind that you can ethically harvest medium-sized game like whitetail deer,” said Jared Kutney, centerfire rifle and pistol development manager for Federal Premium Ammunition…

Kutney points out that determining the lethality of a firearm isn’t based just on the size of the caliber. How much killing power a firearm has is a function of caliber size and bullet selection.

“Penetration and transfer of energy, or expansion of the bullet, are both critical to achieve a lethal shot,” added Kutney. “They’re just as important as caliber.”

Consider today’s intricately designed, high-power .223 ammunition, like the 55-grain Barnes Triple-Shock and 60-grain Nosler Partition by Federal Cartridge Company. According to Kutney, “Either of those loads will bring down a 300-pound whitetail.”

In the clip, an employee of Smith & Wesson goes hunting for a giant aoudad — a goat-antelope — with a Smith & Wesson AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. The rifle is loaded with .223. “These days the technology in ammo development over the last 4 or 5 years really has come a long way,” the Smith & Wesson guy says. “It really is a viable round. It’s something that people should seriously think about.”

In the video, you see the guy setting up his rifle from 150 yards away. He trains it on the giant aoudad. The kill shot comes at 4:10 in the video. There is only one shot. The animal immediately convulses, crumples, and plunges down a rocky embankment. “That shot, I was pretty excited about it,” the Smith & Wesson guy explains afterward. “Because I took that shot on an animal that is pretty tough to kill. With a .223 round, which is pretty small… and it had no problem with this one. And it went straight down.”

I write all this with reluctance. It feels strange to respond to such an absurd argument. And the journalist Elspeth Reeve has already capably dismantled it. But I keep seeing it again and again. Opponents of new laws to limit illegal gun sales and curb gun violence clearly find it rhetorically useful to understate the power of semi-automatic assault-style rifles (also called “modern sporting rifles”). It appears to be a common and long-running strategy. I think the point is to draw those who want new laws into a trap. If opponents of new laws can convince people that the weapons aren’t as powerful as commonly portrayed, then anyone arguing for a ban on AR-15s will have to argue for a ban on “more powerful” weapons as well, like certain kinds of hunting rifles.

This is the conversation opponents of new laws want to have: a conversation about the power of the round. I think the response is obvious. As Patrick Radden Keefe pointed out in the New Yorker, “…the only non-military context in which a high-capacity magazine proves decisively useful for the shooter is one in which you are trying to mow down as many civilians as possible before you get killed by a SWAT team.” Although an assault-style rifle with a bunch of 30-round magazines is undeniably a powerful weapon, the case for banning it — the gun and the magazines — rests not on the power of its round but on its ability to kill the maximum number of people in the shortest amount of time.

5. There are few, if any, centrist gun experts. As others have pointed out, the two sides of this issue largely live in different worlds. Gun owners don’t understand the left’s squeamishness about guns, and the left doesn’t understand gun owners’ love of them. I wanted to learn more about guns, so I went looking for a centrist guide. I wanted to read a book by someone with ties to the gun culture who also appreciates the gun-violence problem.

All roads led to Paul Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, assistant managing editor at Businessweek, and a guy who is often quoted as an expert in stories about guns.

I read Glock. I read everything Barrett has written about guns in the last month for Businessweek, which is a lot. I watched him on MSNBC, describing his views on guns as “idiosyncratic” — not on the right, not on the left.

Here’s what I think about Paul Barrett: very sharp reporter. Good writer. Author of an impressive, useful book. But not a centrist. Barrett writes about guns from the right.

I can’t remember seeing a semi-automatic weapon of any kind at a shooting range until the mid-1980’s. Even through the early-1990’s, I don’t remember the idea of “personal defense” being a decisive factor in gun ownership. The reverse is true today: I have college-educated friends – all of whom, interestingly, came to guns in their adult lives – for whom gun ownership is unquestionably (and irreducibly) an issue of personal defense. For whom the semi-automatic rifle or pistol [the Glock is a semi-automatic pistol] – with its matte-black finish, laser site, flashlight mount, and other “tactical” accoutrements – effectively circumscribe what’s meant by the word “gun.” At least one of these friends has what some folks – e.g., my fiancee, along with most of my non-gun-owning friends – might regard as an obsessive fixation on guns; a kind of paraphilia that (in its appetite for all things tactical) seems not a little bit creepy. Not “creepy” in the sense that he’s a ticking time bomb; “creepy” in the sense of…alternate reality. Let’s call it “tactical reality.”

I’m not trying to pick on Barrett here. I’ve learned a lot from him. I think I’ve even gotten a few people to buy his book. I only want to point out an interesting lacuna. Polls show that gun owners hold less extreme views than the NRA leadership, and a majority of Americans support stricter gun laws. So why aren’t there more centrists who write regularly about guns? Has the influence and extremity of the NRA has made a true centrist position impossible to occupy? (I haven’t yet read C.J. Chivers’s The Gun. I’ve heard amazing things.)

More on where I’m coming from:

I haven’t written much about guns, unless you count the videogame and plastic varieties. Several years ago, I did write a long piece for GQ about a shooting in Philadelphia, a piece that involved some research into the FN 5.7 Herstal handgun. Before that, in 2003, I spent six months reporting on the Cincinnati Police Department, following a class of new recruits through the Academy. I was with them when they were issued their guns, and I was with them when they were taught how to shoot. After they graduated, I rode along with several of the new officers in the back of their cruisers. One night, I rode along in a SWAT van, on a raid. (I did the ride-alongs because I might write a book about the Cincinnati PD, but I moved out of the city before I had the chance.) Police organizations tend to support efforts to curb gun violence and promote gun safety, but I didn’t really talk to the officers about gun policy. Mostly what I got from the experience was a powerful sense of the arsenals that criminals commanded. This is what’s out there, I kept hearing. This is what we’re up against.

I don’t own a gun. Years ago, I did some target shooting at an interfaith religious retreat in rural Pennsylvania. I was taking photographs there for a college class (the photo at the top of the post is mine). It was the kind of retreat that had a belly-dancing class, Wiccan literature, and a bunch of people walking around without pants or tops. Also a gun range. I don’t remember the kind of gun I shot. I do remember being kind of distracted by the nudity. I remember the feeling of the recoil. I don’t have anything profound to say about what it was like to shoot a gun for the first time. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it. The people running the retreat told me that, for a first-timer, I was a fairly accurate shot. I felt proud.

One last note. If you see any factual errors in this post, please let me know — jfagone at gmail dot com, or jfagone on Twitter — and I’ll correct.

Hello & Welcome

I'm a 36-year-old journalist and a 2014-15 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. I've written about science, sports, and culture for a number of different magazines, and I've published two books with Crown, part of Random House. The books are Ingenious and Horsemen of the Esophagus. Some of my clips are linked below.